Tag: Amsterdam

Amsterdam Ad Ban Typifies Climate Alarmism’s Farce

Amsterdam just became the world’s first capital to outlaw public ads for both meat and fossil fuels. Starting May 1, city officials scrubbed billboards, tram stops, and metro stations of promotions for gasoline cars, airlines, cruises, and distant vacations, along with beef, chicken, pork, and fish.

From CO2 Coalition

By Vijay Jayaraj

Amsterdam just became the world’s first capital to outlaw public ads for both meat and fossil fuels. Starting May 1, city officials scrubbed billboards, tram stops, and metro stations of promotions for gasoline cars, airlines, cruises, and distant vacations, along with beef, chicken, pork, and fish.

In place of the now illegal ads are posters for the Rijksmuseum and piano concerts, which apparently are included in the city’s vision of a carbon-neutral metropolis that consumes half as much meat.

Driving the ad ban through city council were two political parties, GreenLeft and Party for the Animals. Their claim of fighting impulse buying that locks in “high-carbon” habits poorly disguises an abuse of political power that denies people reasonable everyday choices in exchange for nothing benefiting the environment. Attacking ordinary human life, Amsterdam officials now treat essential fuels and basic nutrition as societal evils that must be hidden from public view.

City councillor Anneke Veenhoff likens the ban to helping people kick addictions by removing the temptation of a substance to force behavioral change.

Other Dutch cities have instituted ad bans, including Haarlem’s prohibition of meat promotion in 2024 and The Hague’s 2025 barring of fossil fuel advertising. Worldwide, more than 50 cities—from Stockholm and Edinburgh to Sydney and Florence—indulge the same folly.

France passed a national ban on fossil fuel ads in 2022, and Spain is considering one. U.N. boss Antonio Guterres cheered on such bans last year, calling for prohibitions on oil, gas, and coal ads while labeling humans the “meteor” smashing Earth. This “attitude-shifting” is presented as something akin to an anti-smoking campaign.

The ad bans are based on nothing more than climate pseudoscience, which draws on exaggerations of the effects of natural processes, fabrications of data, and speculative computer modeling. The apocalyptic predictions of anti-meat activists, for example, are easily refuted by empirical data. Methane emissions of ruminant animals purported to threaten dangerous atmospheric heating have an immeasurably small influence on the planet’s temperature.

An analysis published by the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia, shows that even extreme mitigation measures produce negligible results. Eliminating all 1.6 billion cattle worldwide was calculated to avert warming by about 0.04 degrees Celsius. The effect of killing 1.3 billion sheep would be 10 times smaller.

These figures represent changes so small that they fall below the threshold of detection in real-world climate systems.

Policies crippling to agriculture produce massive economic destruction for no benefit. No sane leader would spend a single taxpayer dollar to chase such statistically irrelevant and ludicrous objectives. Activists pushing these agendas demand immense sacrifices from working families while offering no environmental improvement.

The campaign against fossil fuels mirrors this same detachment from reality. Energy abundance remains a requirement for prosperity. Fossil fuels have powered innovation, extended lifespans, and expanded opportunity everywhere. Hydrocarbons power transportation, generate electricity, and serve as feedstock for countless products. From fertilizers that sustain crop yields to materials used in medicine, fossil fuels underpin modern life.

European politicians banning advertisements for petroleum-powered vehicles signal a profound ignorance of history and economics and a deficit of common sense. Modern economies rely on affordable, abundant coal and natural gas to power factories, build infrastructure, and move essential goods. When international bodies stigmatize these fuels, they threaten the economic advancement of the world’s most vulnerable populations and the sustenance of all.

Advertising bans serve only to boost a feeling of moral superiority among urban elites while achieving nothing and jeopardizing much. They represent a rejection of human progress and a dangerous embrace of unscientific dogma.

Amsterdam’s performative stunt exposes climate dogma’s hollow core of grand gestures and zero results that must be rejected at every opportunity.

Originally published at PJ Media, May 22, 2026.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.

Greenpeace Legal End Run to Avoid US Court is Ruled Out of Bounds

The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, U.S. sovereignty and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled four to one that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury already decided.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

AI generated free pik

Jason Isaac report at The Hill Greenpeace’s attempt to swindle US courts just got harpooned.  Excerpts in italics wtih my bolds and added images.

The North Dakota Supreme Court just drew a bright line for the rule of law, U.S. sovereignty and the energy infrastructure that keeps our country running. On May 7, the court ruled four to one that Greenpeace International cannot use a Dutch court to nullify what a unanimous American jury already decided.

It is a welcome victory, but the fight against eco-lawfare is far from over.

The case began in 2019, when Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace and other activist groups over the coordinated, sometimes violent campaign waged against the Dakota Access Pipeline. After six years of litigation and a three-week trial, twelve North Dakota jurors unanimously found Greenpeace liable for conspiracy, defamation, defamation per se and tortious interference.  The damages exceeded $666 million across the three Greenpeace defendants, with more than $130 million tagged to Greenpeace International alone. The jury heard the evidence and reached its verdict.

That should have been the end of it. It was not.

Two weeks before the North Dakota trial began, after six years of fighting in American courts, Greenpeace International filed a new lawsuit in Amsterdam. The plan was straightforward: ask a Dutch court to declare the North Dakota case “manifestly unfounded and abusive” under a new European Union anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) directive, then use that foreign declaration to erase the verdict and seize Energy Transfer’s assets wherever they could find them. It was a calculated end-run around our judiciary, dressed up in the polite language of European jurisprudence.

The North Dakota Supreme Court saw through it. Justice Jerod Tufte, writing for the majority this month, made the principle clear:

Substance matters, not labels. A claim that requires a foreign court to find an American jury wrong is a collateral attack on that jury, no matter what name the lawyers attach to it.

The court ordered the trial judge to issue a narrowly tailored injunction
blocking Greenpeace from pursuing the parts of its Dutch action
that depend on relitigating what North Dakotans already decided.

The opinion is worth quoting on the point that matters most,  The court wrote,:

“ Comity expires when the strong public policies of the forum
are vitiated by the foreign act.”

In plain English, foreign courts get respect when they earn it. A party that races to Amsterdam on the eve of an American trial to undermine the anticipated verdict cannot then demand that American courts politely defer to the foreign proceeding it manufactured.

This is the right ruling. It is also a narrow one.

The injunction applies to one party in one state. Unfortunately, that means Greenpeace can still pursue the parts of its Dutch action that do not require erasing the North Dakota verdict.

Federal courts have not yet weighed in on whether American courts can block foreign collateral attacks on American judgments. And the federal circuits are split on how heavily international comity should weigh against such injunctions. Other state supreme courts have not taken up the question. The next activist group with a domestic loss and a foreign sympathetic forum will try the same play, just with better lawyers and a cleaner record.

And they have plenty of reasons to keep trying. The European Union’s 2024 anti-SLAPP directive was sold as a shield for journalists and dissidents in countries with weak speech protections. In practice, however, it is becoming a sword aimed at American energy companies that win in court. The directive’s “manifestly unfounded” standard invites foreign judges to second-guess the merits of American court verdicts. Article 17 invites damages claims for the offense of having sued. The architecture is custom-built for the exact tactic Greenpeace attempted.

The deeper problem is that the activist legal industry has discovered something useful. When the protests fail, when the defamation campaigns get punished, when the juries refuse to play along, there is always another forum, another court, another friendly jurisdiction willing to entertain the argument that American energy infrastructure is itself a kind of crime.

The point is not to win on the merits. The point is to make building anything in this country so legally treacherous that capital flees and projects die. This strategy will work in proportion to how seriously American courts take it.

The North Dakota Supreme Court took it seriously. Other courts must follow. Congress should pay attention too. American companies operating under American law, sued in American courts and vindicated by American juries should not have to fight the same case all over again in Amsterdam, Brussels, or anywhere else.

A federal statute clarifying the authority of American courts to block foreign collateral attacks on domestic judgments would put the matter beyond doubt. The Trump administration’s commitment to energy dominance demands nothing less.

The stakes are not abstract. Every data center humming with artificial intelligence, every factory bringing jobs back from overseas, every home heated through a North Dakota winter depends on the ability of American companies to build, operate, and defend the infrastructure that delivers reliable energy. Strip away the certainty that an American verdict actually means something, and that infrastructure becomes a much riskier bet. Risk premiums rise. Capital gets scarcer. Projects do not get built.

Greenpeace lost in North Dakota. It lost again on May 7. This is all good. But the rest of the country needs to make sure those losses stick and continue, because the next case is already being drafted somewhere, and the activists who brought us a six-year siege of the Dakota Access Pipeline are not going to take this defeat as a final answer.  Neither should we.

Right, Washington Post, Banning Hamburger Ads Won’t Stop Climate Change

A recent Washington Post (WaPo) article, “Amsterdam’s ban on advertising hamburgers won’t stop climate change,” blasts a new law in Amsterdam banning advertisements for meat in public spaces. The order is meant to decrease the demand for meat to stop climate change. The WaPo Editorial Board has the correct reaction. It is ridiculous and authoritarian to try to control what people eat and will have no impact on weather or global climate.

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

A recent Washington Post (WaPo) article,  “Amsterdam’s ban on advertising hamburgers won’t stop climate change,” blasts a new law in Amsterdam banning advertisements for meat in public spaces. The order is meant to decrease the demand for meat to stop climate change. The WaPo Editorial Board has the correct reaction. It is ridiculous and authoritarian to try to control what people eat and will have no impact on weather or global climate.

WaPo’s editorial board reports on a new law in Amsterdam, which “just banned all advertisements for meat in public spaces,” in order to reduce meat to help fight climate change. But, as WaPo points out, “[c]ensoring ads for beef, pork, chicken, and even fish won’t reduce carbon emissions. Nor will it make people less hungry for protein and other nutrients essential to a healthy diet.” WaPo says that European green activists are “so hypnotized by climate hysteria and the belief that it poses an “existential threat” that they rationalize authoritarianism.”

WaPo is correct. The focus of the “eating meat causes climate change” argument is that cattle produce methane, which contributes to warming. It is completely absurd to think that reducing meat consumption in Amsterdam would have any real impact whatsoever on that, even if the base theory is correct. According to United States EPA data, all the cows in the United States contribute just about 2 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases, with a population of around 90 million cattle. There are less than 4 million head of cattle in the Netherlands.

The Dutch certainly do not eat only Dutch beef, but the population of Amsterdam’s metropolitan area is around 1.6 million people, comparable to Phoenix, Arizona or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Large cities to be sure, but not large enough for their eating habits to make a dent in global climate. It is absurd on its face. Even worse it is an authoritarian restriction on free speech for a non-harmful activity.

Climate Realism has noted on multiple occasions that targeting cattle and meat eating will not change the weather or slow global warming. Amsterdam, according to WaPo, “has set a totally unrealistic goal for residents to get 60 percent of their protein from plant-based sources by 2030.” It is unclear why Amsterdam officials believe that energy-intensive, highly processed plant-based alternatives to meat are better for the environment than all-natural meat and eggs, but even if it did, this is a clear authoritarian overstep by what was supposed to be a democratic government. But it’s not the first time Netherland’s officials went climate-crazy and targeted food: in 2023, the state put forward schemes to forcibly shut down farms across the country and buy out farmers, and force them into contracts that would ban them from moving to other countries to farm elsewhere. A political backlash resulted in the nation’s government moderating its plans.

They want to push what farmers remain to go all-organic, which ironically means they will need more land to produce anywhere near the same output because yields will fall, resulting in higher overall emissions.

These schemes are, as WaPo correctly stated, both unrealistic and authoritarian. Human beings are omnivorous, meat-eating animals, the fats and proteins in meat are essential for brain development. Our guts are evolved to process meat from animals whose guts are evolved to process roughage we can’t eat. There is no climate benefit from reducing meat consumption, nor is there any other kind of environmental benefit. The government of Amsterdam is overstepping, with no scientific backing. So much for the Netherlands being a bastion of liberty and the free exchange of ideas.

Amsterdam Bans Meat And Fossil Fuel Ads But You Can Still Get Stoned

The tireless virtue-signallers of Amsterdam have found another route to saving the planet. Since May 1st advertising meat and fossil fuels has been banned in the familiar way the Left seeks to modify behaviour.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Sallust

The tireless virtue-signallers of Amsterdam have found another route to saving the planet. Since May 1st advertising meat and fossil fuels has been banned in the familiar way the Left seeks to modify behaviour. The BBC has the story:

Politicians in the city say the move is about bringing Amsterdam’s streetscape into line with the local government’s own environmental targets.

These aim for the Dutch capital to become carbon neutral by 2050, and for local people to halve their meat consumption over the same period.

“The climate crisis is very urgent,” says Anneke Veenhoff from the GreenLeft Party. “I mean, if you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?

“Most people don’t understand why the municipality should make money out of renting our public space with something that we are actively having policies against.”

Supporters of the policy argue that the initiative will help to make people freer, even though meat advertising only constituted 0.1% of advertising revenue:

This view is echoed by Anke Bakker, who is Amsterdam group leader for a Dutch political party that focuses on animal rights – Party for the Animals.

She instigated the new restrictions, and rejects accusations of them being nanny state.

“Everybody can just make their own decisions, but actually we are trying to get the big companies not to tell us all the time what we need to eat and buy,” says Bakker.

“In a way, we’re giving people more freedom because they can make their own choice, right?”

Removing that constant visual nudge, she says, both reduces impulse buying, and signals that cheap meat and fossil heavy travel are no longer aspirational lifestyle choices.

The idea it seems, is that by “grouping meat with flights, cruises and petrol and diesel cars reframes it from a purely private dietary choice to a climate issue.”

Others might call this a form of brainwashing. One wonders what might else be grouped with meat, flights and fossil-fuelled cars.

Unsurprisingly, the Dutch Meat Association, which represents the industry, is unhappy at the move, which it calls “an undesirable way to influence consumer behaviour”. It adds that meat “delivers essential nutrients and should remain visible and accessible to consumers”.

Meanwhile, the Dutch Association of Travel Agents and Tour Operators says that the ban on advertising holidays that include air travel is a disproportionate curb on companies’ commercial freedom.

Of course, this doesn’t affect advertising online. So will it even work?

However, some researchers are cautiously optimistic, such as Professor Joreintje Mackenbach who is an epidemiologist – a medical professional who investigates health patterns within populations.

“If we see advertisements for fast food everywhere, it normalizes the consumption of behaviour of fast consumption,” says Mackenbach, who is from the Department of Epidemiology and Data Science at hospital Amsterdam University Medical Centre.

“So if we take away those types of cues in our public living environments, then that is also going to have an impact on those social norms.”

“Because like everything we love, festivals, nice cheese, a flower shop around the corner. All the stuff that we love, we don’t hear from through ads,” she says.

“I think and I hope that big polluting companies will be extra scared. And maybe will rethink the kind of products they are selling. I think you can really see that change is possible.”

A quick glance through Professor Mackenbach’s publications shows a strong interest in using nudge techniques to change people’s behaviour.

As the New York Times observed, in permissive Amsterdam ads for fossil fuels or meat are now verboden, but you can still get stoned:

Amsterdam is famously a place where anything goes. Prostitution is legal. Coffee shops sell marijuana and hashish. Truffles laced with the psychoactive compounds found in hallucinogenic mushrooms are available at ‘smart shops’.

But what is no longer allowed in the freewheeling city’s public spaces are advertisements for products that some city councillors consider to be true vices: Big Macs. Exotic vacations. Gas-powered cars.

Ads for airlines, cruises and faraway destinations are no longer allowed, because they implicitly promote the burning of fossil fuels. Ads for beef, chicken, pork and fish are also banned, because of the environmental harms caused by animal agriculture.

Interestingly, the City Council in The Hague passed the first such law in 2024. In 2025 a trade association and travel agencies sued, only for the judge to rule that the health of citizens and the climate were more important than commercial considerations. Getting stoned and substituting hallucinogenic tripping for going on foreign trips aside.

Never mind though, the abstemious and righteous Dutch can console themselves with festivals, nice cheese and flowershops. And by getting stoned.

Anyone fancy a Big Mac?

The BBC’s piece is worth reading in full.